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Title: | Adaptation of the virtual assessment of mentalizing ability and evaluation of its utility and psychometric properties in Chinese individuals on the schizophrenia spectrum | Authors: | Cao, Y So, WWY Wang, Y Hu, DD Xie, Y Gu, J Chan, RCK Shum, DHK |
Issue Date: | 2025 | Source: | Schizophrenia, 2025, v. 11, 43 | Abstract: | Schizophrenia is associated with impairments in theory of mind (ToM), the ability to understand and attribute mental states. However, the nature of the deficits across ToM subconstructs (viz., first- and second-order cognitive ToM, and first- and second-order affective ToM) remains unclear, partly due to assessment issues. The current study aimed to first adapt an ecologically valid ToM assessment tool, namely, the Virtual Assessment of Mentalizing Ability (VAMA), for use among healthy Chinese individuals (Study 1). We then compared 39 schizophrenia patients with 37 controls, and 48 individuals with high social anhedonia (SA) with 54 individuals with low SA (Study 2) using the adapted version of VAMA and Yoni Task. Results of Study 1 showed that the adapted VAMA demonstrated acceptable reliability (item-total correlation and test-retest reliability for total score, r = 0.731, pFDR < 0.01) and construct validity (main effect of Order and Type). In Study 2, schizophrenia patients performed significantly worse than controls, making more “hypermentalizing” and “no mentalizing” ToM errors. Moreover, hypermentalizing error in the patient group was found to be significantly associated with their negative symptoms (r = 0.388, pFDR < 0.05). Interestingly, the VAMA results differed from those of the Yoni Task, possibly due to differences in task complexity. Finally, individuals with high SA showed impairments in second-order cognitive ToM compared to the controls. Overall, our findings suggest that the VAMA can be adapted for use in China, and is sensitive to ToM impairments in clinical and at-risk groups. Limitations on the psychometric properties were discussed. | Publisher: | Nature Publishing Group | Journal: | Schizophrenia | EISSN: | 2754-6993 | DOI: | 10.1038/s41537-025-00594-1 | Rights: | This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. © The Author(s) 2025 The following publication Cao, Y., So, W.W.Y., Wang, Y. et al. Adaptation of the virtual assessment of mentalizing ability and evaluation of its utility and psychometric properties in Chinese individuals on the schizophrenia spectrum. Schizophr 11, 43 (2025) is available at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41537-025-00594-1. |
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